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Mathematics Colloquium EVENT DETAIL Date:  Tuesday, March 06, 2012 Title:  Phase Transitions in Molecular Evolution: Relating Combinatorial and Variational Distances on Trees Abstract:  I will describe recent results on a deep connection between a well-studied phase transition in Markov random fields on trees and two important problems in evolutionary biology: the inference of ancestral molecular sequences and the estimation of large phylogenies using maximum likelihood. No biology background will be assumed. Speaker:  Sebastien Roch Institution:  UCLA   Back to current Colloquium List Back to UM Math seminars page .